MARTINHO DIAS

MARTINHO DIAS – interview

KLASSIK INTERNATIONAL Brand, Barcelona – New York, 2018

By Laura Gomez

 

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What experience of your life would you say that is reflected in your works of art?

– Simply the experience of living.

 

How would you define yourself as an artist?

- I see myself as a figurative, expressive, serious and good-humoured artist. I need some organisation and method. I project the ideas before I get to work on the canvas or whatever it is. Concept interests me a lot, but I am not conceptual.

I am not able to show what I want merely through the mind. I usually make use of the painting with paint, brushes and magnetic cards.

In essence, I am a narrative (re)builder, an image and context manipulator.

 

For how long have been in art? How did you start?

– I would say that I have been in Arts for as long as I can remember, having started with “playing art”. I was always a very busy child and when I had no occupation, I would invent it. Sometimes my mother would anticipate that invention for me.

I would use every single piece of paper I was given to draw or paint – it could be an incomplete invoice book or the white cardboard which helped a new shirt to maintain its form.

I never wanted to be an astronaut because I thought it was impossible, but I believed I could fly with big wing-shaped cardboards tied to my arms. I built, I destroyed, I enlarged and I rebuilt a great number of houses (inhabitable) in the yard. I consider myself privileged because, from a young age, I had my own home, despite being vulnerable to fires, floods and landslides. With divine protection, I would use cutting tools to build boats, planes and carts. Later, I built my first easel, then my studio.

In my first oil painting, I used water to dilute the paints.

I attended a secondary school of artistic education, and then the Faculty of Fine Arts. I started to look for a job in publishers, as a freelancer, starting activity as a storybook and schoolbook illustrator. Later, I started to teach at secondary school, and I’ve done that for thirteen years. In parallel, I would still make time for painting.

 

What themes do you pursue?

– My subject matter is mainly social, playing with power and its lack, with several behaviours or with different moments of History which are closely connected. I am interested by the human figure and its condition, in frozen movement. The figures rarely appear isolated, but as a part of the frequently paradoxical, surreal or even absurd narratives. This is to attempt at some balance with the excess of “reality”, “logic” and “truth” in which we are submerged.

 

What inspires you to work?

– Besides the professional point of view, I am motivated by the necessity to materialise or achieve something. Only that way I can make it known to others – that is my job.

 

Where do you find inspiration?

– I find inspiration in the times we live in and in the way we live them. The news and the images of the media cans also be inspirational. Above all, and more than facts, I am interested in the way humans relate to each other. The way we behave in society and in private is often present in my work. I rely on what I know and see, but also on what I don’t know.

 

What for you is the most enjoyable part of your art?

– The final part of the execution of a work of art is the one that gives me the most pleasure. To me, it is towards the end (uncertain) when I start to see the completion of something. After all, that is why I started.

Although I have, from the start, an idea of what I am going to do, the initial phase is always of expectation, anxiety and, a lot of times, of dull work. Then, it may (or not) be a party and I may not notice time go by, as I may have an unexpected battle to fight.

 

What does being creative mean to you?

– Being creative means to be able to do something new with what everyone has access to, but no one has done anything with yet. Just like words, for example. We all make use of the same words as writers or poets, but only some make the syntactic combinations that tell them apart from others.

Creativity and creation are not owned by artists. There are a lot of common people, less common then everyone. Creativity should be mandatory in everyone’s life.

 

What famous artists have influenced you, and how?

– Contrary to the tendency to catalogue, define and name everything, I prefer the “bittersweet”. There were times when rock music would avoid classical music like the plague. These days, despite many merely pamphletlike combinations, we can witness admirable matches between an electric guitar and a violin, for example. In other words, I may be absorbed by scratches, accidental stains or rough gestures, with traditional, smoky, precise, photographic or minimalist combinations.

To make this clearer, imagine a common work with these artists: Sigmar Polke, Ai Weiwei, Rembrandt, Benjamin Clementine, John Cage, Willem de Kooning, William Turner, Antoni Muntadas, Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, AC\DC, Philip Glass, Thomas Struth, Julian Schnabel, Vermeer, Stockhausen, Leonard Cohen, David Salle, Bernardo Sassetti, Franz Kline, Dan Flavin, Jackson Pollock, Fragonard, Anish Kapoor, Antoni Tàpies, Brian Eno, Anselm Kiefer, Ghada Amer, Shirin Neshat, Nils Petter Molvær, Peter Haley, René Aubry, Bill Viola, Courbet, Rolling Stones, Helnwein, Fiona Rae, Paula Rego, Mike Dragas, Pina Bausch, Malevich, Ron Mueck, João Penalva, Picasso, Ad Reinhardt, Millet, Gerhard Richter, Kandinsky, Francis Bacon, Jenny Saville, Ann Hamilton, Gary Hume, Caravaggio, Júlio Pomar, Cecily Brown, Cézanne, Hermeto Pascoal, Laurie Anderson, Marlene Dumas, Jeff Wall, Joseph Beuys, Velásquez, Murakami, Monet, Sol LeWitt, Joy Division, Maurizio Cattelan, Nuno Rebelo, Delacroix, Kennet Noland, Kronos Quartet, Francisco Goya, Peter Greenaway, Gary Hill, Steve Reich, Albert Oehlen.

These are only some of the artists who may be present in my work, either inside my painting, or as company. I am interested by the precision of some, as well as by the spontaneity, experimentation, gestures or aggressiveness of others, either they’re realists, minimalists, classical, abstract or conceptual.

Actually, it is hard to name two or three influential artists to me.

 

What role does the artist have in society?

– The artist integrates society as any other citizen. The artist does not work for the society, but depends on it to exist. In turn, society does not need the artist, but what he is capable of creating. If he exists – we may no notice his presence, but if he wasn’t there, our existence would lose sense. His role is to be an artist.

 

Should art be funded? Why?

– Art should be funded when the completion of a work is at stake, either from the artist’s point of view, or from the public’s point of view. I, as an artist and as a connoisseur, should not be deprived from making what I do (for others) known, nor should I be deprived of what was made for me, just because it exceeds my economic power. Naturally, I exclude the acquisition of works.

All of this is dependent on the capacity and instruction level of the governors, in what concerns cultural policies, just like it depends on the citizens to demand those policies.

This is a very short and inexact answer for a relevant and complex question.

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What do you think about the art community and market?

– For a long time, art and market have been working together. There are those who are a bit reluctant to talk about two things at the same time, as if the artist worked for himself and the result of such work lost dignity for being marketable with a market value. The value of the work of art, as such, is not changed just because a commercial value is assigned to it. A great deal of the art and anti-art which opposed the market ended up in museums and collections by means of commercial transactions.

However, a distinction between “commercial art”, which may not deserve the statute of “art” from the moment it is created for the market, and the work of art that is created for a specific purpose, or spontaneously by the artist, to which a price is assigned.

I think that nowadays a good part of the arts community is overly involved with the market, with tendencies, in making trousers and socks match. While the art field expands, there are means and techniques which are considered archaic compared with other new means which alone do not make the work of art. Our minds are so blown by the magnificence of the means or by the artist’s production, that we don’t even notice the absence of “art” in the work.

On the other hand, there seems to be some shame that a work of art may be understood by more than three people apart from the artist.

Many things are overrated and based on several archaic conceptualisms of the middle of the 20th century. In this regard, I quote Beuys, in 1964, from his book “Every Man an Artist”: “The silence of Marcel Duchamp is overrated.”

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